Shenya used to work in wildlife conservation in Sri Lanka. Today she is an investigative data engineer at DARC, the Data and Research Center in Berlin. Her job, in DARC's words: "making complex datasets accessible and uncovering insights from them."
what an investigative data engineer does.
Investigative journalists often need data that is scattered, messy or buried: company registers, sanctions lists, thousands of PDFs. Shenya writes the scrapers that collect it automatically and the pipelines that clean it and put it into one shared format. Reporters can then search it and see how people, companies and money connect.
who it is for.
DARC is an independent organisation that provides data and research services for investigative teams. Its clients are journalists, NGOs, civil society organisations and a few companies. It maintains OpenAleph, a free, open source platform for searching documents and datasets, and the DARC Library, which holds more than 200 datasets ready for investigative data journalism. Her bio on the team page adds: "This means the DARC Data Library is about to get a lot bigger and better."
before the data.
After wildlife conservation and welfare, she worked in product development and consulting. Before DARC she contributed to a project at the Museum für Naturkunde that pulled data on extirpated species, animals that have vanished from a region, out of research papers. DARC describes it as bridging ecological knowledge with modern data techniques.
the problems you haven't seen.
The most valuable thing a developer learns isn't how to solve the problems they have already seen. It's how to approach the ones they haven't. That is what 42 gave her: strong foundations, a sense of which parts of tech she actually wanted, and the confidence to take on unfamiliar systems and work them out. Concepts from the Advanced Cybersecurity Piscine turn up in her work constantly.
the network did the rest.
Her current role came through the network she built at 42. Jan Lukas Strozyk, a former 42 Berlin student, is one of DARC's three founders. Before DARC he was chief data editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and a reporter at NDR, and worked on the Panama Papers and the FinCEN Files.
In July 2026 Shenya was among the students who completed Transcendence, the final project of the 42 Core Curriculum. 42 didn't give her a single route into tech. It gave her the foundations, and the confidence to find her own. Meet the DARC team.
Shenya